Most people who follow the Israeli news of the missiles that fall in southern Israel would know the toll that it has taken upon the people there. What you often hear on the news is that a missile fell and that no one was hurt… physically. The mental damage is another story in itself.

The working class city of Sderot (est. pop. 20,000), in southern Israel, is possibly the first city since Sarejevo to live under constant bombardment of its civilian population for a sustained period of time. Sderot has been under missile attack from Gaza for more than six years, and it has been hit by more than 1,400 missile attacks since Israel pulled its civilians and soldiers out of nearby Gaza during the summer of 2005, which includes more than 100 missile attacks since Israel declared a cease-fire on November 26, and stopped any real military response to these attacks.

One by product of this situation is that the small mental health trauma unit in Sderot was simply no longer able to meet the needs of the situation, with more than 3,000 people in Sderot in treatment for the after effects of shock, anxiety and stress.

And so, in late December 2006, Israel’s daily HaAretz newspaper broke the story that Sderot’s mental health trauma unit was going to be forced to close in a few days with the beginning of the calendar year, for lack of funds.

Almost immediately upon hearing the news that Sderot’s mental health services were collapsing, some American prominent philanthropists wrote to the UJC, the New York-based umbrella organization that helps Israel and other Jewish causes, and asked what the UJC was doing about providing emergency mental health assistance to the already distressed city of Sderot and other communities under fire in Israel’s Western Negev region.

The immediate response that these donors got was a letter, dated December 28, from the public relations department director of the UJC, which delineated the generous allocations to Sderot and the Western Negev that the UJC was planning for the region. These letter spelled out the following allocations:

* “$1.5 million has been allocated to provide 20,000 Sderot-area children ages 5-16 post-trauma counseling/therapy; school-based afternoon enrichment activities, study time and meals for two months;

* $997,500 has been allocated to provide 35 psychologists to complement the 110 already in place, to provide therapy in Sderot-area schools for six months;

* $956,640 has been allocated to provide 3,000 of the 37,000 students in ORT schools who suffer from trauma with counseling/therapy;

* $700,000 has also been allocated to provide 4,000 kids in 1st-6th grades with one- to three-day field trips in the center of Israel.

* $150,000 was allocated for the Yuval program, which helps support front-line emergency response personnel, specifically in four locations in the Sderot/Gaza region.”

However, on January 8th, when Dr. Adriana Katz, the head of the mental health services for Sderot saw a copy of the letter, she laughed and commented that “this is the greatest piece of science fiction that I have ever read”, and went on to say that while the six psychologists working in Sderot would be pleased to welcome 35 more psychologists who would indeed be needed to provide follow-up services to 3,000 people in Sderot, there was no indication from the UJC or anywhere else that these allocations were en route to Sderot or to the Western Negev.

Throughout January, calls to the UJC about the emergency allocations to the mental services of Sderot went unanswered – until this past Wednesday, when a UJC donor received a letter from the UJC in New York which spelled out the way in which $3 million had been spent by the UJC in the Sderot area during the calendar year 2006, yet with no mention of what would be provided for Sderot in 2007.

A source close to the UJC reported that the UJC would indeed hold an allocations meeting some time in March.

What about the $4 million that the UJC promised for Sderot mental health services in the UJC letter of December 28?

No comment about that commitment was forthcoming from the UJC.

At this point in time, the commitment of the UJC philanthropy to provide $4 million in aid to the mental health services in Sderot is only on paper.

Simply stated, the people of Sderot would like to know if the December 28 commitment made by a respected American philanthropy will be fulfilled.

The answer is that they will have to wait until the UJC allocations meeting, to be convened sometime in March.

This article ran in the Philadelphia Bulletin on February 16th, 2007

1 COMMENT

  1. Thank you so much for posting this. Readers who wish to continue reading the article (the additional four pages) can click on the Forbes link at the very top. With very best regards and thanks, -Richard

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David Bedein
David Bedein is an MSW community organizer and an investigative journalist.   In 1987, Bedein established the Israel Resource News Agency at Beit Agron to accompany foreign journalists in their coverage of Israel, to balance the media lobbies established by the PLO and their allies.   Mr. Bedein has reported for news outlets such as CNN Radio, Makor Rishon, Philadelphia Inquirer, Los Angeles Times, BBC and The Jerusalem Post, For four years, Mr. Bedein acted as the Middle East correspondent for The Philadelphia Bulletin, writing 1,062 articles until the newspaper ceased operation in 2010. Bedein has covered breaking Middle East negotiations in Oslo, Ottawa, Shepherdstown, The Wye Plantation, Annapolis, Geneva, Nicosia, Washington, D.C., London, Bonn, and Vienna. Bedein has overseen investigative studies of the Palestinian Authority, the Expulsion Process from Gush Katif and Samaria, The Peres Center for Peace, Peace Now, The International Center for Economic Cooperation of Yossi Beilin, the ISM, Adalah, and the New Israel Fund.   Since 2005, Bedein has also served as Director of the Center for Near East Policy Research.   A focus of the center's investigations is The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). In that context, Bedein authored Roadblock to Peace: How the UN Perpetuates the Arab-Israeli Conflict - UNRWA Policies Reconsidered, which caps Bedein's 28 years of investigations of UNRWA. The Center for Near East Policy Research has been instrumental in reaching elected officials, decision makers and journalists, commissioning studies, reports, news stories and films. In 2009, the center began decided to produce short movies, in addition to monographs, to film every aspect of UNRWA education in a clear and cogent fashion.   The center has so far produced seven short documentary pieces n UNRWA which have received international acclaim and recognition, showing how which UNRWA promotes anti-Semitism and incitement to violence in their education'   In sum, Bedein has pioneered The UNRWA Reform Initiative, a strategy which calls for donor nations to insist on reasonable reforms of UNRWA. Bedein and his team of experts provide timely briefings to members to legislative bodies world wide, bringing the results of his investigations to donor nations, while demanding reforms based on transparency, refugee resettlement and the demand that terrorists be removed from the UNRWA schools and UNRWA payroll.   Bedein's work can be found at: www.IsraelBehindTheNews.com and www.cfnepr.com. A new site,unrwa-monitor.com, will be launched very soon.